A V2G Test: Pool Electric Cars for Grid Needs

A consortium seeking to make plug-in vehicles an aggregated resource for utilities and grid operators is demonstrating its ideas. It's among a number of pilot projects seeking to find ways to integrate the electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle fleets of the future into an increasingly "smart" grid.

It's a truism of the smart grid set – to bring millions of plug-in hybrid or electric cars to the public, utilities will have to find a way to make sure they don't crash the grid with their recharging needs.

And to take it a step further, it would be nice if those batteries could serve as backup power for a stressed-out grid as well via so called "vehicle-to-grid," or V2G, technology.

So far it's a small test, involving a handful of electric cars outfitted with University of Delaware-developed software that allows grid operators to suck the batteries' power when needed, without leaving them so discharged that commuters can't get home after work.

But the Mid-Atlantic Grid Interactive Cars Consortium, or MAGICC, as the group calls itself, has grander plans – a fleet of electric cars that can be aggregated to become a genuine resource for utilities to tap for their second-to-second peak power needs.

The city of Newark, Delaware got the ball rolling last month with a six-vehicle test, and the consortium brought one of its AC Propulsion-modified Toyota Scion cars to demo at the DistribuTech conference in San Diego this week.

Paul Heitmann, Comverge's director of business development and "EV/V2G specialist," says the group intends to expand the pilot to hundreds of cars soon.

As for Comverge's role, "We'd be sort of the retailer," building the platform to allow cars to be aggregated as a group as a power resource for utilities, Heitmann said. That fits in with the company's business of

All these tests better lead to something, if electric and plug-in hybrid cars are to have a future. A study by DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratories found that the United States would have to build 160 new power plants to handle plug-in vehicles by 2020 if nothing is done to integrate them into the grid.

But if technologies for controlling those charge-ups on a grand scale can be implemented, that additional power resource needs would be reduced to a range of eight power plants to none at all, the report stated.

One thing the MAGICC consortium is focusing in on is making sure that software and systems for vehicle-to-grid technologies remain open, Heitmann added.

"Let's develop it and open it to everybody," he said. That could be important as utilities and grid operators develop markets for buying massed car battery power for backup during peak load times, he said.

Of course, plug-in vehicles aren't really a problem for the grid at present, since there probably aren't more than a thousand or so on roads today.